Variation among chlorine concentration ratios for native and agronomic plants

Variation among plant/soil concentration ratios (CRs) for important radionuclides requires attention because it is a major source of uncertainty in nuclear environmental safety assessments. For agronomic plants, variation among plant species is easy to deal with because there are relatively few species. In natural settings, there are vastly more species and the question becomes how to develop representative statistical distributions of CRs. Chlorine (Cl) is a good element with which to address this problem, because 36Cl is a key radionuclide in nuclear waste disposal and yet stable Cl is easily measured in the environment. We measured CRs (dry weight basis) for Cl among edible parts of agronomic plants at one site, and found a geometric mean (GM) of 10, a geometric standard deviation (GSD) of 1.9 and a range of 5–66. When the GM was weighted by the relative contributions of the various plants to the human diet, it rose to 16. Among native plants at five sites, each site representative of a specific environment, the GMs were 4.0–13 and the GSDs were 2.9–6.2. The CRs for individual species ranged from 0.8 to 170. However, when weighted by relative contributions of the plants to selected animal diets, the GMs were as high as 50. The conclusions are that: the variation in CR for agronomic plants is a subset of the variation among native or all plants, variation among species (the GSD) can be sixfold, and variation among species is large enough that typical diets of specific animals could expose them to several-fold higher amounts of Cl (or 36Cl) than expected from generic CR values.